MAY 25, 2020

Photograph: Pace Gallery website

As an artist I am naturally self-isolating, but it feels very different when everyone else is doing it too. What you are isolating from is important. It influences what you are able to do with that separation, and it has taken me a while to come to terms with the difference. Since we’ve been in lockdown, I’ve found it easier to work at night. The darkness of night somehow unifies what’s outside the window, making the stillness more normal. By going this small amount further, falling out of step with the schedule of the local world one extra degree, this isolation feels more recognizable as the usual conditions for art making. There is isolation, and there is isolation.

Photograph: Pace Gallery website 

But the fading of daylight can have other positive effects. The crossover between night and day is a moment of transition where hopes and expectations can be addressed. And if your sleep patterns have changed a bit, like mine have, this nocturnal lifestyle can be a peaceful interval, a space for deeper thought. It is a time when you can consider the future in a small but manageable way; you can leave things behind that didn’t go so well yesterday. The symbolic crossover point is midnight, and for me this idea has become a color, a scale of blue values moving from ultramarine toward black. Midnight blue has become the core dark light of these new paintings on paper, weaving together an acceptance of what is and a hope for what might come in a single unbroken gesture. It speaks to me of the darkest point before the return of the light.

Photograph: Pace Gallery website 

Staring out of windows, going for a run in the countryside at night, gazing at a phone, reading a book, trying to write something, trying to grow something. Some of these things have made their way into these works, but they are not about isolation in any primary or singular way. What’s more important for me is to continue exploring my visual language, find new twists and turns within it maybe, but essentially connect with its energy and life force to keep myself going, staying in touch with the sustaining magic of the process of painting.

These new works follow on from the paintings shown at Pace in New York in January, and relate to those made for my upcoming show at Pace in Geneva, so they form a kind of bridge. Whereas the previous works emerged into full color from thickets of murky gloom, these works differ in that they move from higher color toward darkness. They sketch out and chase forms in color, but as decisions are made, this gradually resolves into a dominant composition and a thicker darkness, a blue black the color of midnight, composed of swirling and looping lines and shapes. Woven into this dark tone is a sense of optimism and hope for me, of recalibration and openness to change, captured as the color flares out between the web of darker marks.

Photograph: Pace Gallery website 

Similarly, the imagery ebbs and flows, flickering in pentimenti of rehearsed faces and plant-like forms, resolving into firmer and darker articulations. There is a kind of hieroglyphic, sidelong eye, a profile that gazes at a far horizon, that will be familiar from recent large-scale paintings. In the current climate, these take on a more desperate sense of search. They now seem to hold vigil for a soon-to-return figure. They watch at the edge of the image as though at the threshold of home, looking for the visitor that cannot come, for the time being.

Made after twilight, these works are in a sense inversions of the previous way of working, the same approach flipped for a parallel but unfamiliar moment. I like to think that they celebrate the peaceful unity of the night, the precious value isolation holds for creative expression.